The Filing Cabinet Drawer

(The happy couple, November 18, 1983)

This morning I decided it was time to clean the spare room. This tiny spot has three filing cabinets, several bookcases, the holiday decorations, and right much junk in it.

Three boxes filled with tax records need to be put away. But to do that, I need to clean out the filing cabinets, sending old records to the shredder or up to the attic.

So I opened the top filing drawer. It held no files, just piles of stuff, including one big fat envelope. Written on the envelope are the words "To Anita, With Love, Mom, 7/00." Ah. The envelope my mother prepared and gave me just before she entered the hospital, never to come home.

I had rifled through it before, of course. Then I stuck it away. And here it was again. The things my mother thought I should have. They included:

• Pictures of my nephew.
• Pictures of other family, including many I don't know.
• My school report cards.
• My mother's school report cards.
• Pictures of my mother, from birth to just before she took ill.
• Pictures of me as a child.
• My mother's high school essay on the history of Catholicism.
• The sheet music ("Royal Ballet") that I played in a piano recital in 1976.
• Two poems I wrote before I was 12.
• My wedding photos.

The above picture was one of the first to fall from the envelope. There we were, my baby and me, ready to take on a cake and the rest of our lives. Husband had a full head of hair back then; it's about all gone now, and what's left is silver. And there I am, with hair much longer, and body much smaller. Who are those people!?

I sorted through the photos, the papers, and thought about my mother. We had a rocky and stormy relationship my entire life. And here in these pieces of paper was all that's left of whatever was between us.

This is one of the poems she saved, written by her ten-year-old daughter:

What a rock has seen

There is a rock that belongs to me,

a big grey rock made from the sea.

If it could talk it'd tell me tales

of dolphins and fish and laughing whales.

It'd tell of the sea, calm and serene,

and turtles and shells and seaweed green.

Laughing mermaids and small sea horses,

and schools of fishes learning their courses.

I wish it could talk, 'cause I'd like to know

about laughing whales and where they go.

Because I've never seen one, and neither have you,

But my rock doesn't lie so it must be true!